One product it showed off was a new closed-loop liquid cooler design, which Zalman claims is the first such product to include a full aluminum radiator heatsink with copper heat pipes. Traditionally such designs simply use a fan and radiator design, but Zalman says that by adding heat pipes as well, it greatly ups the cooler's performance.

The cooler is designed to dissipate up to 400 watts of power consumption on the CPU and is officially branded the "CI Water Cooler".

CI Water Cooler

The device will ship in late March or early April. Possible launch colors include white, blue, and black -- Zalman may opt to launch all three, or pick the one it thinks customers connect to the most. A price has not been announced, but something around ~$200 USD sounds about right.

Zalman also showed off a large cube-shaped passive cooler, which it dubs "Fanless Cooler". The design features 10 copper heatpipes and a "hexahedron" aluminum heatsink.

Zalman Passive Cooler

The cooler is situated well off the motherboard, so that it won't clash with high profile memory modules (e.g. modules with heat-spreaders). The cube can add an optional ultra-quiet 92 mm fan inside the hollow cubic metal radiator cage to allow for mild overclocks. The price point is still being determined.

The Korean company also showed off graphics cards with special coolers (both AMD and NVIDIA Corp. (NVDA)) designs. Zalman has no immediate plans to bring these cards to the U.S., but is interested in experimenting with whether it can leverage its cooling expertise with third-party board designs to produce a superior graphics card.

A Zalman GPU!

Another Korean-only product is a series of LED lamps. One unit was a simpler design with multiple positioning degrees of freedom and several brightness settings. A second unit incorporated FM radio, and other connectivity features. Zalman says these designs are in the prototype phase and could eventually make it to the U.S. in production form, although no plans are currently solidified.

Zalman LED lamp prototypes

Last, but not least Zalman was excited to show off its inexpensive mini- or micro-ATX cases, which will retail for around $30 to $40 USD. The case will support 2 SSDs (2.5-inch) and one full 3.5-inch HDD (in a vertical slot). It can pack up to six fans and supports full 290 mm graphics cards. Zalman says it has been receiving a great deal of attention from unnamed system integrators regarding the case, given the affordable MSRP and surprisingly full feature set for such a small case.

Another design Zalman wanted to highlight was the MS800 series. Supporting full and micro-ATX boards, the case offers a sedate look, and has relatively nice removable faceplate designs. It features 2 USB 3.0 ports. One interesting perk is that Zalman includes sliding supports along pillars that help hold the weight of the GPU (multiple supports are included in case the user opts to go multi-GPU). I haven't heard a lot of reports of GPU cards snapping off under their own weight, but it certainly seems like it'd be a decent idea, if you're going to be frequently jostling the case around on the way to LAN parties, etc. The MS800 will ship in March likely priced in the $170-190 range.

"Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours) in resources to create an Intel host controllers spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology." -- Intel blogger Nick Knupffer